CHAPTER XIV.
ANIMISM (continued).
Animism, expanding from the Doctrine of Souls to the wider Doctrine of Spirits, becomes a complete Philosophy of Natural Religion — Definition of Spirits similar to and apparently modelled on that of Souls — Transition stage: classes of Souls passing into good and evil Demons — Manes-Worship — Doctrine of Embodiment of Spirits in human, animal, vegetable, and inert bodies — Demoniacal Possession and Obsession as causes of Disease and Oracle-inspiration — Fetishism — Disease-spirits embodied — Ghost attached to remains of Corpse — Fetish produced by a Spirit embodied in, attached to, or operating through, an Object — Analogues of Fetish-doctrine in Modern Science — Stock-and-Stone Worship — Idolatry — Survival of Animistic Phraseology in modern Language — Decline of Animistic theory of Nature.
The general scheme of Animism, of which the doctrine of souls hitherto discussed forms part, thence expands to complete the full general philosophy of Natural Religion among mankind. Conformably with that early childlike philosophy in which human life seems the direct key to the understanding of nature at large, the savage theory of the universe refers its phenomena in general to the wilful action of pervading personal spirits. It was no spontaneous fancy, but the reasonable inference that effects are due to causes, which led the rude men of old days to people with such ethereal phantoms their own homes and haunts, and the vast earth and sky beyond. Spirits are simply personified causes. As men's ordinary life and actions were held to be caused by souls, so the happy or disastrous events which affect mankind, as well as the manifold physical operations of the
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